"Nowhere, and you pay attention to your sister, what she says."

They had to start somewhere, Hicks thought. She was one of the first. They didn't know where to begin. The suspicion of her inadequacy—if that was the right word— of her inability to qualify for the migration, did not prevent her from seeing the good they were doing, or the necessity of their work.

If we have any free will at all now.

That question was still unanswerable. Hicks preferred to think they did have free will, which implied that this woman demonstrated a truly admirable human quality: selfless courage.

Two days later, she drove him to the airport, and he boarded an airliner for San Francisco. Only on board the aircraft did he realize that he had heard the names of the woman's children, but not her own.

High above the Earth, over the deck of obscuring clouds, Hicks napped and typed notes into his computer and realized he was not, for the moment, on call. The network had released him for these few hours and he was not privy to the ordered flow of voices and information. He had time to think, and to ask questions. How did the spiders get through airport security? That seemed easy enough. They had departed his luggage in the scanners, crawled through the mechanisms, and reentered the luggage beyond the sensors' range. Or they had means of altering their X-ray shadows. Human sensory apparatus had failed completely from the beginning; if the bogeys could land on Earth without being detected, what was so amazing about a spider passing through airport security?

He mused about these things behind his closed eyes, relishing the temporary privacy. Then, on impulse, he inserted a CD carrying the texts of his complete works into the computer and called up Starhome. Scrolling through page after page, he skimmed the long sections of characterization (reasonably adept and no more) and intrigue and politics and read in more detail the passages of speculations and extrapolations. It's not a bad book, he thought. Even now, two years after I finished it, it engages my interest, at least.

But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future. What future was there? Certainly not the.one he had envisaged—a future of humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.

Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization ...

And yet . . .

Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.

Or perhaps not.

Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.